The Reflections unit was essentially about finding out who you are. I learned several things about myself, like the things that I value and acknowledging some struggles I was going through. The projects I had to do was write a reflective piece about myself that addresses a certain point in my life where I was going through some conflict. I wrote about my stepdad and how we never got along when it came to working with him, or just everyday stuff that I did that he never agreed with. I had to make myself independent from him so I would move past the point of having to suck up everything my stepdad has put me through. Another project I had to do were two animation loops with graham crackers, because the person who made the graham crackers was born on my birthday, July 5th, at least according to a certain website. The essay was an interesting topic to write about and I’m proud of how it turned out, and the animation loops ended up great and I had a good time thinking of what to do with my animations.

 

Personal Essay

The process of writing my personal essay wasn’t really difficult, I just had to write about what I felt about a certain situation and how I overcame it. I feel I addressed a lot of my core values as a person and this essay can show you quite a bit about who I am.

At ten I lived with my mom and my siblings, because my mom had divorced my dad. My brother, sister, and I lamented the fact that we wouldn’t see our biological parents together anymore, but we still got to visit my dad every other weekend and still have a good relationship.

Eventually, my mom met a man who didn’t seem too bad at first. He was fairly strict but never too unfair. That man later became my step dad when he married my mom three years later.

We get in some fights from time to time, but when I turned sixteen, he became increasingly strict and as a result we got in a lot more fights about personal ideals and views on things. He was a very religious person and throughout the several years he and my mom have been together, he has been trying to push his religious agenda on me. He always thought that as long as I’m living in his household I’m not allowed to choose what my ideals would be and that his job as a parent is to enforce the “correct” ideals. If he told me to do something and I asked for clarification, he would punish me because he thinks that’s the only way I won’t forget the thing he taught me. We never saw eye to eye on anything, especially when it came to my hobbies. Eventually, his reign in our house got to be so overbearing that my sister had already left and the custody was given to my dad, who she is very clearly a lot happier with and feels a lot less limited to do the stuff she enjoys doing. That really isn’t that much of an option for me since I still want to go to my current school, so all I could do was endure.

Several more arguments took place, up to the point where my mom got sick of them, and her advice to getting on my stepdad’s good side was to pretty much be a pushover. Even though that was the best way to deal with him, part of me wouldn’t let me become one and I didn’t want to just comply with everything my step dad said. Therefore, I continued to have conflict with him.

In the summer of 2018, my stepdad took me to work with him in his labor job, where I had to do most of the back breaking tasks. I worked with him a total of 10 days; whereas we’d usually work for 9 hours, one day I had to be at work around 12 hours, during which time I had to haul over 2000 pounds of materials. That extreme labor left me sore for a couple of days, but he still wanted to take me to work the next day – until my mom intervened. He always said that the reason he’s taking me to his job is to show me how work really is and that it’s just to prepare me for the future, but I always thought that was bullsh*t.

After some time, I felt that I needed to get a job in order to be less reliant on him and minimize our interactions. I decided to become independent from him and was hired to become a cashier. For the time I’ve been working there, I can tell you that work is not how he says it is and that I am not slaving away and causing a lot of a back pain for a measly $600. I’m still waiting for him to pay me what he owes, but at least. now I don’t have to be a pushover. I am my own person that can make his own decisions about how to live my life.

 

Perspective Piece

The perspective piece was a very interesting project where I got to choose a topic to address and voice my opinion on it. I chose a fairly controversial topic that many people may not agree with, but that’s what opinions are pretty much about, to voice your stance on something that not everyone has to agree with. At the end of this, I said something extra controversial and could be a perspective on its own, but it was more of a shock factor thing.

ARVE Error: Mode: lazyload not available (ARVE Pro not active?), switching to normal mode
Adobe After Effects User Interface

This screenshot shows the interface of Adobe After Effects and it shows the resources I used. At the left side it shows the resources I worked with, as well as my voice over recording. It was very simple to make this, I only added on the resources, the pictures were in order of when they should appear, and I just cut trimmed the clips to only show up when they’re supposed to, added a fade by moving some clips by a couple of frames and adjusting the opacity, added the text, made the pictures move by key framing them (having a start point to an end point and it animates the in between), then rendered. Pretty simple.

 

Animation Projects

The first assignment was to make a name tag kind of thing where we had to show, not tell, stuff about us. I went with a digital alarm clock with a crack in it and a silhouette of a person on a monitor on it. It’s supposed to mean that I am on my computer a lot, sometimes till very late at night and the crack in the screen is to show how I like to sleep, (probably not at the recommended times) and how I wouldn’t want to get up when the alarm rings, so the logical thing to do is to smash the clock.

My name in the form of an alarm clock that is cracked with a silhouette of a person looking at a monitor.

The animation loops was just a fun project where we had to choose an event that happened on our birthdays, and animate a google style website header and a loading screen with the topic of choice. I chose to animate graham crackers. According to some website I was looking through, the person who invented graham crackers shared a birthday with me on July 5th, so I decided to animate brown squares.

Graham Crackers playing around on the Google logo.

Graham cracker loading screen where it spins, gets eaten, then pops back into existence.

We also made maya models where we picked out an object that represents us and made a 3d model of it in maya and explain why it represents us. I chose a petting cactus that I have. In this case it is inside a mug and is wearing a top hat, monicle, and a bowtie. The cactus is inside of a mug that says “TOP CAC” on it with a crack on the back of it. The way this object says a lot about me is because I like weird things like this a lot and that you can still feel good, even in the roughest situations. This is represented by the crack in the back of the mug, and just the fact that theres a cactus growing in a mug is an abnormal thing, but despite all that the cactus is looking good and feeling fresh.

Maya user interface displaying a cactus with Arnold Render Viewer on the smaller windowThis screenshot shows the interface of the program, the huge screen is the model viewer where you can modify your creation with layers of different shapes, you can see the shapes I used on the left side as well as the lights (red outline) and the camera (green outline). To the right, the small screen is what it will look like if it was rendered, to an extent.

The thing that I valued in this project is that, no matter how infuriating the programs I had to use were, I was still able to make something out of my imagination, with a reference, and be proud of it. It also opens up a lot of opportunities knowing how to 3D model, but I probably will try to avoid 3D modeling since it is not my cup of tea.